Archive for the “ShukerNature”

Few cryptozoologists will be unaware of the Naden Harbour carcase – an enigmatic serpentine animal carcase removed from the stomach of a dead whale at a whaling station in Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands in July 1937, and thought by some cryptozoologists to have been a juvenile Caddy, the elusive sea serpent of Cadboro Bay, British Columbia. Today, this mysterious carcase is long-lost, but three famous photos of it still exist. Far less familiar than the Naden Harbour carcase photographs, conversely, are two Caddy-linked pictures that were first brought to my notice 20 years ago. To my knowledge, they had never previously received any cryptozoological attention, and even today they remain little-publicised.

European and Middle Eastern medieval mythology is populated not only by such famous examples of fabulous beasts as the dragon, griffin, basilisk, centaur, unicorn, and minotaur, but also by many lesser-known yet no less fascinating fauna, including a small furry mystery beast called the mimick dog. The reason for its name is that the mimick […]

On 31 January 1930, the Danish research vessel Dana unexpectedly captured an exceptionally long eel larva (leptocephalus) at a depth of about 900 ft, west of the Agulhas Bank and south of the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Whereas leptocephali of the common European eel Anguilla anguilla measure a mere 3 in long at most, and even those of the formidable conger eel Conger conger only reach 4 in, the Dana‘s remarkable specimen was a colossal 6 ft 1.5 in! This in itself was quite staggering, but its implications were even more astounding.

Dr Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German physician and naturalist participating during the early 1740s in the last of Danish explorer Vitus Bering’s Russian expeditions to the Arctic waters (now called the Bering Sea) separating Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula from Alaska. During this expedition, Steller documented many new species of animal, including four very contentious forms that continue to arouse cryptozoological curiosity even today.

One of the most perplexing sagas in the fascinating chronicles of cryptozoology is the long-running search for the thunderbird photograph, supposedly missing, presumed lost, for over a century. Here is an investigation that I have conducted with regard to this mystifying, allegedly real picture (which may well – or may not ever – have existed). […]

In spring 1987, amid the far northeastern Kamchatka peninsula region of what was then the Soviet Union but is now Russia, hunter Rodion Sivolobov obtained the skin of a giant white bear. To most eyes, it might simply look like the pelt of an over-sized polar bear, but according to Sivolobov, and the area’s local […]

…the publication of The Menagerie of Marvels, whose subtitle, A Third Compendium of Extraordinary Animals, reveals that it is volume #3 in my series dealing with extraordinary animals from both cryptozoology and mainstream zoology.

With an area of more than 340,000 square miles, New Guinea is second only to Greenland as the largest island in the world (Australia is bigger than both but is officially deemed an island continent, rather than a mere island). Throughout its length and breadth, however, are dense and often little-explored rainforests where various surprising […]

Just to let you know that at 10 pm on 23 August Pacific USA time and at 6 am on 24 August UK time, I’ll be appearing for an hour-long interview on Coast To Coast AM’s radio show, talking about giant spiders as inspired by my recent ShukerNature blog post.

The anomalous phenomenon of red eye-glow is one that has been reported both with tangible, corporeal creatures of cryptozoology (including bigfoot, mystery dogs, and mystery cats) and with zooform entities of a seemingly supernatural, paranormal nature (such as phantasmal Black Dogs and pookas). The instance of red eye-glow presented here, however, provides a uniquely clear-cut, […]

Monstrous spiders of gargantuan size are perennially popular subjects in science fiction ‘B’ movies as well as in classic fantasy novels such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, but could such beasts exist in reality? The current record-holder for the title of world’s largest spider is Rosi – a […]

The legendary basilisk was originally described in Western folklore as resembling a relatively small, unspectacular serpent in basic form. Down through subsequent ages, however, reports of it changed during the endless retellings of myths until it eventually became much larger, and acquired a cockerel’s coxcomb and wattles, as well as the ability to crow like a cockerel too. This marked the beginning of the basilisk’s gradual transformation into a much more dramatic-looking yet equally fictitious monster – the cockatrice.

Although it can often equal or even exceed the leopard Panthera pardus in overall size, the puma Puma concolor is not a ‘big cat’ in the strict scientific sense – its throat structure, for example, is quite different from that of true big cats (i.e. belonging to the genus Panthera). It is particularly surprising, therefore, that successful matings between pumas and some of the Panthera species have occurred – the resulting hybrids thereby being intergeneric rather than merely interspecific.